Revision as of 18:29, 19 October 2008

Contents

Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity

It is generally agreed upon that "linguistic creativity" is a unique
property of human language. Some claim that linguistic creativity is
expressed in our ability to combine known words in a new sentence,
others refer to our skill to express thoughts in figurative language,
and yet others talk about syntactic recursion and lexical creativity.

For the purpose of this workshop, we treat the term "linguistic
creativity" to mean "creative language usage at different levels", from
the lexicon to syntax to discourse and text (see also topics, below).

The recognition of instances of linguistic creativity and the
computation of their meaning constitute one of the most challenging
problems for a variety of Natural Language Processing tasks, such as
machine translation, text summarization, information retrieval, question
answering, and sentiment analysis. Computational systems incorporating
models of linguistic creativity operate on different types of data
(including written text, audio/speech/sound, and video/images/gestures).
New approaches might combine information from different modalities.
Creativity-aware systems will improve the contribution Computational
Linguistics has to offer to many practical areas, including education,
entertainment, and engineering.

Within the scope of the workshop, the event is intended to be
interdisciplinary. Besides contributions from an NLP perspective, we also welcome the
participation of researchers who deal with linguistic creativity from different
perspectives, including psychology, neuroscience, or human-computer interaction.

Location

The CALC-09 workshop will be held in conjunction with NAACL HLT 2009 in Boulder, Colorado.

Topics

We are particularly interested in work on the automatic detection, classi
cation, understanding,
or generation of:

Depending on the state of the art of approaches to the various phenomena and
languages,
preference will be given to work on deeper processing (e.g., understanding,
goal-driven generation)
rather than shallow approaches (e.g., binary classication, random
generation). We also welcome
descriptions and discussions of:

computational tools that support people in using language creatively (e.g. tools for computer-assisted creative writing, intelligent thesauri);

computational and/or cognitive models of linguistic creativity;

metrics and tools for evaluating the performance of creativity-aware systems;

specic application scenarios of computational linguistic creativity;

design and implementation of creativity-aware systems.

Related topics, including corpora collection, elicitation, and annotation of
creative language
usage, will also be considered, as long as their relevance to automatic
systems is clearly
pointed out.

Invited Speaker

Nick Montfort, MIT

Submissions

Submissions should describe original, unpublished work. Papers are limited to 8 pages. The style files will be available here soon. No author information should be included in the papers, since reviewing will be blind. Papers not conforming to these requirements are subject to rejection
without review. Papers should be submitted via START; more information on this will be available here, too.